Kae Tempest’s new novel is dedicated to “you”, the reader. It also comes with a plea: “Be gentle though.” But to whom or what should we be gentle? The book or the writer? Having Spent Life Seeking is Tempest’s second novel, arriving a decade after his first and following a period of considerable personal change, including gender transition. Perhaps inevitably, it is a book full of struggle and soul-searching. It is also painfully earnest: an enervating read with an exhausting intensity that neither relents nor resolves.

The publisher hasn’t helped here, bombastically announcing it as a “heart-breaking, soul-building new novel”. That’s a great deal to live up to, even for someone who established a reputation first as a blazingly fervent spoken-word poetry performer, winning the Ted Hughes award in 2013, and making Mercury prize-nominated albums in 2014 and 2017. But the grandeur of the publisher’s claims also suggests something of the melodramatic register of the book, which is all grand passion, big trauma and heroic self-discovery. What it lacks is any convincing sense of interiority or reflection.

The novel opens with 36-year-old Rothko Taylor, recently released after two decades in prison for a crime yet to be disclosed to us. Living in a van with a stray dog and picking up casual work, Rothko imagines a tentative future in which they might earn enough to “go private … Start on T” (testosterone). For now, they cut a solitary figure, struggling with automated supermarket checkouts and a longing “just to be touched”. Edgecliff, the bleak and bluntly named fictional seaside town in which the book is set, mirrors the novel’s own grim emotional terrain. Here Rothko must contend with their past, most pressingly in the form of Meg, their neglectful and substance-addicted mother, now in a care home with dementia

Tempest structures the novel simply, with a long flashback bridging the past to the present and filling in the backstory. At 15, Rothko struggles with their parents’ acrimonious divorce, uncertainties about their gender and a secret love affair with fellow teenager Dionne. Tempest’s prose is markedly lyrical throughout, as though he were determined to wrest beauty from the jaws of gritty realism. The issue is that his realism never feels real. Take Rothko’s jailtime, which is given thuddingly clunky treatment: “Jail had been a hard place for hard people who had seen hard things.”

But Rothko finds a community, both in jail and in the life they rebuild after it. Jail, like poverty, squalor, addiction and trauma, can be made beautiful, seems to be the suggestion. If Tempest lingers over the “clump of leaves, bird shit and slimy crisp packets” in a broken gutter, it is so that he might later present a counter vision of grace. “People needed beauty,” Rothko’s sister Sarai observes of Rothko, “Especially the ones who’d soaked up more than their share of ugliness. So the rest of us didn’t have to.” The sentiment that suffering might be a comparative economy and beauty its compensation is deeply unsettling. Later, Rothko seems to marvel at the self-harm scars on Dionne’s legs. This is romance for Rothko, but it’s also an uneasy read.

Trauma, of different kinds, is the book’s primary concern. But trauma in itself doesn’t constitute a plot. And it doesn’t follow that cataloguing the traumatic events of a life would be the best way to carry a reader into the experience of it. Part of the problem is that Tempest’s prose so readily slips into verse: fragmentary, sometimes facile. When Rothko descends into addiction, Tempest writes: “Rothko came to and the whole world was carnage. Monsters in the dark sniffing canisters of varnish.” Rather than elevating the prose, the rhymes feel glib and the sentiment vague, shorthand for an unspecified intensity: “They wanted things they couldn’t name; they wanted rest. They wanted change.”

Lines like “Days went by in a daze of Dionne” might work in a song but are mortifying as a sentence. Dionne herself is thinly drawn, a cool girl carrying tarot cards, a Rizla-rolling version of the manic pixie dream girl, tasked with redeeming the hero. Later, Tempest writes that “Rothko escaped their body when they vanished into Dionne’s. Her pleasure was their victory over the world that made them ashamed and never enough.” But here’s the problem. Rothko has no distinguishing qualities of their own other than their gender dysphoria and unhappy childhood. Is a person only the sum of the things that happen to them? And is the solution really as simple as reviving a teenage love affair?

In the end, it is to Dionne that Rothko makes his declaration: “I’m a man.” Tempest marks the moment with a shift in pronoun from “they” to “he”, a gesture that carries genuine emotional weight. If it is difficult to honour Tempest’s request that readers “be gentle” with his book, it is nonetheless clear that this is a novel animated both by his own vulnerability and a wider sense of that among trans men and trans women. And there’s certainly room for new novels to come that might be equal to the task of capturing the complexity of that experience with sensitivity and power.

Having Spent Life Seeking by Kae Tempest is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

For Christian booksellers, any good news about Bible sales has been few and far between. But recent retail figures have shown a revival.

Sales of the good book reached a record high in the UK in 2025, increasing by 134% since 2019 – the highest since records began – according to industry research. Last year, total sales of Bibles in the UK reached £6.3m, £3.61m up on 2019 sales.

The sudden uptick of interest has caused booksellers and scholars to ask some profound questions of their own, such as where these newly curious readers are coming from and whether faith, or another more modern phenomenon – namely social media influencers – have called them to the word of God.

“We’ve seen an increase in people coming to the Bible from scratch,” says Aude Pasquier, retail sales director at Church House bookshop near Westminster Abbey.

“They have no Christian background whatsoever. They have no grounding from their parents or from their school. Whereas most people in prior generations would have.

“It’s definitely younger people who are seeking some sort of spirituality – they want to understand the world and themselves better,” she said.

Steve Barnet, the owner of St Andrews bookshop in Buckinghamshire, believes that same search for spirituality is setting some young people on a path which starts with online personalities such as Jordan Peterson – the conservative Canadian influencer – and leads to religious texts such as the Bible.

“[Peterson] is not a Christian, but through him, a lot of people are going on a spiritual journey. Some are ending up in church, some are ending up elsewhere. Some are ending up in a good place. I would think ending up as a Christian in church is a good place.”

Barnet has personally observed a new “surprising” clientele of young men entering his shop. “Almost out of the blue something’s changed where people are turning to faith,” he says.

The research was conducted by Christian publisher SPCK Group. It analysed data from the Nielsen BookScan, a service that compiles the sales data of books across the globe.

The study also suggests that religion is one of the fastest growing nonfiction genres, with an 11% boost in sales in 2025, an increase from 2024, when sales grew by 6%. Last year, the bestselling Bible translation was the English Standard Version published by Crossway.

The upward surge in Bible sales in the UK correlates with growth in church attendance in England and Wales in previous years. According to a report published in April 2025 by the Bible Society, the number of people attending church in England and Wales rose by 50% since 2018.

Leading the charge is young people. Only 4% of 18- to 24-year-olds said they attended church monthly in 2018, but in 2024 that number rose to 16% – the largest increase of any age demographic.

Sam Richardson, the CEO of the publisher SPCK Group, notes that these findings are indicative of a changing tide in which the appeal of Christianity has emerged as a “counter-cultural” force, particularly for younger generations in the UK, who have grown up in more secular family and social environments.

“The rebellious thing to do was to be an atheist and follow people like Richard Dawkins and the new atheism which used to be very popular. Now, I think things are reversed. For the next generation it’s more interesting to be a Christian, they’re open to exploring that rather than being automatically closed against it,” says Richardson.

“As we face worldwide political and social change, including the after effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, global wars, the rise of AI, and a growing mental health crisis, individuals are re-engaging with questions of meaning and spirituality.”

Richardson also considers social media an instrumental factor that has made Christianity more “accessible” to young people. “There’s lots of ways that people can have visibility of other people’s spiritual journeys in a much more personal way than was done 20 years ago where you might have to turn up at church and listen to whoever’s in the pulpit.”

The Bible Society report also highlighted that men are more likely to go to church than women, suggesting that this widening interest in Christianity has been spurred by younger males specifically.

The trend is also echoed in the US, where Bible sales reached a 21-year-high in 2025. Similar to the US, a brand of Christian nationalism leveraged for political gain has now become part of the UK political discourse. At a Unite the Kingdom carol service in December, far right figure Tommy Robinson stood beneath a banner which read: “Jesus saves.”

However, leading figures in the Church of England were quick to denounce the “co-opting or corrupting of the Christian faith and symbols to exclude others.”

Richardson says that peaking church attendance and Bible sales predates the development of a Christian nationalist rhetoric. “It has probably been overplayed as a factor,” he says. “There’s definitely something going on, but it seems very recent that Christian nationalism has really started to get attention, whereas this increase in Bible sales has been sustained for six or seven years since 2019.”

About the author

“This is an outstanding book, a deeply thoughtful, imaginative, and occasionally startling piece of work. Through examining the social world of the Prevention Against Atrocities Act, it sets out in moving detail the challenges and possibilities of using the law to challenge ingrained forms of discrimination and violence. While pointing out the limits of the transformative power of the law, Fuchs opens up another level of analysis that explores its unexpected effects and possibilities. In doing so, this is a piece of work that is never willing to simply settle for easy answers, forcing us to ask some hard questions. Throughout, the book is highly engaging, beautifully written, and sensitive in its handling of the material and its subjects, making an important contribution to the social study of law and violence in South Asia.”

—Tobias Kelly, author of This Side of Silence: Human Rights, Torture, and the Recognition of Cruelty

“This is a remarkable book focused on the social life of a law which connects to the deepest and most violent contradictions in contemporary Indian society. Fuchs sensitively explores how the processes around the Prevention of Atrocities Act bring into play the very caste-based violence, patriarchal authority, and silencing of victims that the law intends to prevent. It is a work of compassionate scholarship, with the kind of respect and curiosity that marks anthropology at its best. There are broader lessons here on legal processes amidst inequality: what does it take to be a ‘credible complainant’; how are cases rendered ‘false’, what is the meaning of ‘compromise’? The answers depart from what legal professionals might expect, showing how necessary this ethnographic work is to the understanding of law and the meaning of justice in social reality.”

—David Mosse, author of The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India

“Told through the harrowing stories of caste-based violence, a deeply moving and nuanced account of the hope offered by one of the world’s most significant hate-crime laws to bring justice for Dalits while at the same time generating new forms of intra community violence. A beacon of what an anthropology that cares – based on deep ethnography – can produce, this is a must read for all concerned with hate-crime violence, race and caste, South Asia, and the social life of law.”

—Alpa Shah, author of Nightmarch: A Journey into India’s Naxal Heartlands

About the author

“This is an important book, both for its conceptual sophistication as well as for its rich empirical detail. It makes a convincing case for the centrality of radio-based (and intermedial) communications for understanding how mass politics and mass media became intertwined in modern China, and provides unique contributions not just to new understandings of twentieth century Chinese history, but also to broader discussions in global media history and global histories of technology.”

—Arunabh Ghosh, author of Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China

“News and propaganda have been central to China’s 20th century story. John Alekna’s deeply-researched book gives the inside story of how that ‘newsscape’ was made, providing a powerful new insight into the formation of a society through war and revolution.”

—Rana Mitter, author of China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism

“Seeking News, Making China is a fresh, ambitious, and engaging meditation on the intersection of mass politics and mass media in twentieth-century China. By charting the emergence of a distinctive Chinese ‘newscape,’ it effectively challenges venerable assumptions about the relationship between technology, nationhood, and the news.”

—Richard R. John, author of Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications